Railsback's Some Fundamentals of Mineralogy and Geochemistry

AD, CE, BC, BP, calendar years, radiocarbon years, and all that
BC (Before Christ): AD (Anno Domini, the year of the lord):
years before the nominal years since the nominal birth of Jesus Christ,
birth of Jesus Christ, also designated CE (Common Era)
also designated BCE The Julian Calendar used in Europe from 45 BC Catholic countries and later in other countries. To
until the Second Millennium AD assumed a year of avoid confusion of daily dates during the period of use
(Before Common Era) 365.25000 days (rather than the actual 365.256363 of both calendars, dates in the Julian system are
days). It was replaced by the Gregorian Calendar, designated Old Style (OS) and those in the
which was first adopted in AD 1582 in Roman Gregorian system are designated New Style (NS).
This fortunately is not an issue at the scale of years.
Jesus Christ was
actually born in 4 BC. There is no 0 BC or AD 0.
1000 BC
1 BC AD 1 AD 1000 AD 2000
1st Century AD

3000 BP 2000 BP 1950 BP 1000 BP 5000 BP 0 BP -50 BP

For example, the age BP (Before Present):
1700 14C years BP
converts to
years from AD 1950
Calendar years: 1530 calendar years BP, (a convention arising from the
Periods of 365.2564 days in which Earth orbits Sun and thus to AD 420. details of radiocarbon dating)
Radiocarbon years
or 14C years:
Time required for the radioactive
14C in a particular ancient material
to have decayed to its present 2000 BP 1000 BP 500 BP 0 BP
proportion relative to the stable
12C and 13C in that material,

assuming that the 14C concen-
tration of the atmosphere when
that ancient material formed was
the same as that of the modern
(late 1940s) atmosphere. That
assumption is not valid in detail,
so that measured 14C ages must
be converted to calendar ages.
Conversion from 14C years to
calendar years is called calibra-
tion of the age. Two further
SFMG pages address that topic.
One bit of good news is that U-Th or
230Th dating requires no calibration it
yields ages in calendar years. Those
ages were commonly expressed
relative to the time of analysis but are
more recently expressed as years BP.
LBR ADBCYears01.odg 1/2013 (aka -63 BP)